Grasp nanotechnology at Exploratorium

Making the smallest things big enough to see and the biggest ideas small enough to grasp has been a huge challenge for the Exploratorium exhibit designer the past few months.

Rockwell is the conceptualist behind the San Francisco science museum's new Nanoscape exhibit and on Saturday he wants to see hundreds of hands lacing thousands of "atoms" into a structure that will scrape the ceiling of the cavernous exhibition space to illustrate an object smaller than, as he says, "a fraction of a speck." By building big, visitors will get a glimpse of complexity in a landscape of the very small.

"There is a world down there," Rockwell says. "Just like there is a world up here."

Offering a tour of that world is the challenge Rockwell faced.

In an age when "nanotechnology" is a Wall Street buzzword, the level of ignorance on the most basic structures of our world remains almost willfully high. Nanotechnology isn't science fiction nanobots crawling through your neurons.

Nanotechnology is your neurons.

Everything, Rockwell would say, starts and ends small, a universe of interlocking molecules.

We just don't see it.

"This stuff is invisible."

Nanoscape: Under Construction coaxes visitors to step inside the invisible landscape, and help build it. On select weekends, visitors will be able to lace "atoms" into a latticework that will grow across the exhibit over the summer. They will also see sculptors working in pieces evocative of the nanoscale and see artists' interpretations of nano concepts in the Exploratorium's art gallery. Three forums bringing together panels of scientists and non-scientists will further the exhibit's mission to think outside the nanotube.

Fairfax sculptor Daniel McCormack is one of the artists coming in to help visitors see past the science, or perhaps see it in a way that resonates through the scientific jargon.

A nonscientist himself, McCormack had to weave his way through the language of science to find an approachable aspect in the nanoscape. "I'm kept asking myself questions like 'how would you get to the nanoscale? ... it's so small that these particles don't even have colors because the color wavelengths are too large."

Soaking up what he could, McCormack has sketched out a vision of what a nano tool kit might look like. "Theoretical instruments that are really sculptures," he calls them. "I'm designing an instrument as an artist ... but I'm applying the principles of nanotechnology."

Giving "aesthetic weight to something that can't be seen," is an attempt to bypass the intellectual. "It's smaller than you can imagine," McCormack says.

Rockwell doesn't expect any visitor to truly understand nanotechnology. The exhibit is really an introduction to an introduction. There's no substitute for a graduate degree in molecular chemistry. What he is hoping for is a "qualitative" appreciation of the mechanisms and structures in the unseen.

Because we can see it now.

Sort of.

Advances like the scanning probe microscope are giving scientists a chance to see what they've been looking at in chemistry. They can see how the molecules interact, and chart the very shapes and structures of the molecules themselves. With these new tools they tinker with the previously untouchable.

"Imagine that atoms are like Legos and you're trying to manipulate them with boxing gloves on," Rockwell explains. "Now we can take the gloves are off."

In Nanoscape, visitors will be able to put their hands on the process, or at least an interpretation of the process. Nanotubes are carbon atoms arranged into structures that hold promise in everything from computer chips to a cable strong enough to tether a space elevator from earth to orbit. At the Exploratorium, visitors will help build towering nanotubes out of thousands of plastic spheres.

It may be the only nanotube they will ever see, but nanotubes and nanotechnology are part of a future in which everyone will live. Nanoscape is designed to help people appreciate that, Rockwell says.

"The other message is this is happening now," he says.

Getting people to grasp the simplest aspects and implications of this infinitesimal future is "one of the big unsolved problems in informal science education," Rockwell says.

The exhibit designer has spent his life distilling scientific concepts into hands-on experience. He has always looked for "nuggets people can grab on to" but in the nanoscale, the nuggets were too small.

Rockwell hopes this exhibit will show people some of what the scientists are seeing.